by Graham Daseler
Bright Lights Film Journal
George Orwell once wrote a short but influential essay titled "Good Bad Books" in which he extolled the pleasures of light reading: that is, "the kind of book that has no literary pretentions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished."1 He described the hokey thrill of Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, championed Anthony Trollope over Thomas Carlyle, and argued that Uncle Tom's Cabin would outlive the collective works of George Moore and Virginia Woolf. (The jury is still deliberating that last point, but so far he's been proven at least half right.) Probably Orwell's greatest insight, however, is this quiet little statement found in the seventh paragraph: "The existence of good bad literature — the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously — is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."2 Here is the heart of Orwell's philosophy, and a good maxim for any aesthete to bear in mind — not only those with a taste for Dashiell Hammett novels — for it resounds well beyond the fiction shelf. Orwell himself applied the same logic to poetry, crowning Rudyard Kipling the champion of the form. "Kipling," he wrote, "is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life."3
That Orwell never expanded his series to include cinema is unfortunate, not just because his insights into the world of film would have been a boon to moviegoers, though they undoubtedly would have been, but because by the time Orwell was writing, in the mid-nineteen forties, books were already being supplanted by movies as the popular entertainment of the century. If one were writing on light entertainment, nothing called louder than the cinema. Had he lived but a short while longer, perhaps he would have availed himself of the opportunity. Indeed, a few months after Orwell died in January 1950, MGM, as if to mourn his passing, brought one of his favorite good bad novels to the silver screen: King Solomon's Mines. One can only guess what Orwell would have thought of the film. It's rousing stuff, set in the dark heart of Africa, with adventure, romance, booby traps, hidden treasure, and plenty of hair-raising escapes. Considering his taste for breezy amusement, he should have loved it.
Which leaves us to pick up where the master left off. First, though, a definition is needed: what is a good bad movie? This is more difficult to answer than you might think, and easier described in the negative. Good bad movies are not merely bad movies that we love. I suspect that each of us, no matter how discerning we fancy ourselves, has his or her own list of treasured titles that we cherish less for aesthetic reasons than simply out of fond habit. And maybe it's impossible, when speaking of good bad movies, to untangle cold rationality from personal affection. Anthony Lane, the peerless film critic for The New Yorker, once confided one of his furtively beloved films, prudently burying it in the middle of a review of Saving Private Ryan (1998): "I was nervous about going to see any movie that might make me feel guilty — or, worse still, indifferent — about enjoying Where Eagles Dare, a work of art I revisit with the devout regularity that others reserve for the shrines of saints."4 Where Eagles Dare(1968) is a fine specimen of the species, brusque and brutal, at times almost convincing you that Richard Burton could actually ascend a windy Nazi aerie on his equally daunting liquid diet. It's not one of my personal favorites, but I could easily see how another could be seduced by its coarse charm. In my case, similar fealty is reserved for Die Hard (1988), the only Christmas movie my family ever owned when I was a child. I can still vividly recall how thrillingly adult I felt tying a backpack strap to a toy machine gun and dangling from the slide at the local playground, feebly trying to reproduce one of Bruce Willis's stunts from the movie. I'd love to report that the passing of a quarter century has dimmed my affection, though, in truth, my brother and I still trade lines from that film much more frequently that we do quotes from Citizen Kane (1941), a game, in its own way, no less childish than playing John McClane on the schoolyard.
This is not to say that good bad movies can be explained by mere whimsy, either. Some of the most sublime masterpieces of all time have also been the silliest. Just ask William Shakespeare, Noel Coward, or Ernst Lubitsch. The Philadelphia Story (1940) is as fizzy as the champagne Katharine Hepburn sips with Jimmy Stewart, but this makes it no less deserving of our admiration than Schindler's List (1993). The true good bad movie may well be silly, but its defining factor is less a question of subject matter than of composition: namely, it contains some flaw that, while not ruining its beauty, holds it back from becoming a true gem. Perhaps this is why good bad movies make such rich material for remakes. They provide the fond filmmaker with a solid structure to cling to without being impossible to scale. Why remake something as brilliant as Chinatown (1974) when you know you'll never live up to the original or, obversely, a picture as atrocious as Mommie Dearest (1981) that wasn't even worth watching in the first place? The Getaway (1972), on the other hand, is the perfect vehicle, swift and steady, unencumbered by anything of weight — characters, ideas, lengthy speeches — with a plot as straight and unambiguous as the route the heroes travel, leading invariably to the bloody showdown at the end. It made for an exciting journey with Steve McQueen and his wife in 1972, and it did again for Alec Baldwin and his in 1994. If the formula works, why change it?
And then, of course, there's always the chance that you'll improve on the original. John Carpenter did it with The Thing (1982), reshaping an already strong scenario — a team of scientists battling an alien in the Arctic — into an even better one: in the remake the alien itself is the shape shifter, simultaneously killing and mimicking whatever life forms it encounters. In the years since its release, the film has become a cult classic, with a prequel of its own, oddly also titled The Thing (2011), trying to cash in on the franchise. Those who try to place the film on a par with horror masterpieces like Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Alien (1979) are stretching a point, but not unreasonably. The team of scientists comprises the standard mishmash of characters: nerdy scientists, earnest doctor, ornery old lawman, taciturn hero, and a stoner for comic relief. And there's the usual quota of gore, which Carpenter gleefully flaunts, like a child showing off how gross he can be at the dinner table. When dissected, the monster drips pus and blood; when on the attack, it shoots out slithering tentacles or springs arachnoid legs and scampers off like an overgrown black widow. Under sunny skies, these frights might appear a bit silly, but in the grey, icy abyss of the Antarctic (Carpenter switches Poles for his movie), they seems appropriately portentous, harrying the heroes from within their compound while sub-zero temperatures harry them from without. The theme music by Ennio Morricone is superb: a simple, hollow bass line that has the ominous persistence of death. As for the ending, it's one of the best in cinema history, along with Holly Martins' striking of a cigarette and T. E. Lawrence's watching a motorcycle fly by. It's the kind of wry, stoic affair Hemingway tried to write but never quite could, with two men having a last drink before dying. There's something haunting about it beyond simple sangfroid, though, something to do with the sight of a tiny fire flickering in a sea of blackness and the sound of that inexorable bass line that invariably chills the soul. Ingmar Bergman, at his most existential, never achieved an ending so profound.
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